Åsklanders (BETA) Update
Did you know our Auxiliary books are not just one-off throwaways, never to be touched again? These books allow gamers to explore further sides to our Armies and we are excited to see the continued popularity of these, especially in Tournaments that allow them. As the Warriors of the Dark Gods is getting an update, its only right to update its Auxiliary book as well. With new Warriors of the Dark Gods release Barbarians in the book have a very strong and flavorful Battle Fever, it reflects bravery of Barbarians when fighting for Dark Gods army. Auxiliary books will change this WDG Battle Fever into something better reflecting army flavor and strength. In the case of Åsklanders we went with "horde in shieldwall" flavor while entries that cannot benefit from it (mostly Cavalry) got some free perks because their price is ported from WDG army book.

Warriors of the Dark Gods (BETA) Update
T9A's First Legendary Army Book, "Warriors of the Dark Gods" (WDG) is in its final stages of BETA. Unlike our Main Rulebook and Arcane Compendium (which is now set in stone, known as "Gold"), Army books will only ever have point adjustments done to them, unless the book currently holds "BETA" status for its Legendary Edition. This means it can have design tweaks as well as point adjustments. Once "Warriors of the Dark Gods" reaches "Gold" Status, it too will only have future points adjustments done.
So, on to the update! One of most common community complaints about WDG was its discipline feel. In full agreement, the design team also agreed that Leadership Independence was not correctly implemented, as well as Bubble Ld weakness - the army had 3x BSB entries and 3x Dis 9 Inspiring Presence options!!. Combined, this meant the primary goal was to strengthen Independence and Bubble Ld weakness. The second goal was to not recreate tribalism - as in discouraging mixing different sub-factions like barbarians and warriors in the same list.

WDG army by flavor doesn't excel in tactical brilliance, instead their independence should reflect bravery. So we went with better Panic and Break tests and worse redirect and March tests. We wanted to have "reverse Martial Discipline" feeling like you see in the case of new Battle Fever and Hellforged Armour Fearless + reroll break tests. Feldraks have their own solution, which we are eager to see how it works in practice! The consequence is a very unique army. Barbarians can function more cohesive within the army and they can be independent by themselves, this is a big plus.

In addition to this big army wide discipline independence change, we have also looked at tweaking a few entries. Things where we didn't see price changes as a viable way to make these entries usable, or to make them better fit army list building or character building.

Of course we have also made a several adjustments to pricing. These are based* on the internal balance evaluation survey we ran. For this update we have only looked at the extreme outliers; these were things that without a shadow of a doubt were too strong or too weak. In the future we want to do a lot more with this type of data. But for this update we wanted something released as soon as possible so that we can gather feedback and data on the redesigns. This time constraint limited how much we could do with the data. But we are investigating more complex data analysis tools to be able to deliver more and better pricing updates in the future.
*Redesigned entries of course had additional changes on top.

We all know that we are exploring uncharted territory with this and are completely aware of potential balance problems that will come with it. Those will be short term and we hope to have a patch (mainly points) during the spring, so please give us as much feedback as possible.